The Algorithmic Guillotine: How the Billionaire Boys Club is Privatizing Reality
The Mainstream Media is compromised, the feed is poisoned, and the truth is being memory-holed. If we don’t keep the receipts, the coming Digital Dark Age will erase the chaos.
Billionaires are speedrunning the news cycle. Here’s how they’ll edit the American memory - unless we build an independent record fast.
A handful of men with private jets and public grievances are buying the loudspeakers, threatening to remix the national story in their image. If you felt the floor tilt under your feet this week, you weren’t dizzy - you were watching history go behind a paywall.
Let’s talk about the land‑grab.
The new mogul math: buy the mic, shape the narrative
The Ellison Orbit (Paramount/CBS → The Free Press; eyes on CNN?)
Paramount and Skydance closed their $8B merger in August; David Ellison slid into the big chair and promptly bought The Free Press for $150M—and then installed Bari Weiss as editor‑in‑chief of CBS News. That’s not subtle; that’s swapping the steering wheel mid‑race.1
Ellison’s team is now reportedly circling Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would put CNN in the same gravity well as CBS. Imagine one mega‑constellation setting the prime‑time weather. Even talk of that bid chills the room; consolidation works like an algorithm - quietly, relentlessly - until your feed is just one voice wearing many logos.2
The TikTok carve‑up, starring familiar names
The White House signed off on a TikTok restructuring plan - Oracle and friends take a giant stake; ByteDance shrinks; Americans fill most board seats. And here’s the kicker: Trump himself said Ellison and Rupert Murdoch would be among the investors. A Murdoch‑flavored TikTok is a plot twist nobody requested.3
Elon Musk, platform owner and policy whisperer
You know the drill: own X, set the topic, tag the president. Musk has used his platform and new White House clout to push priorities and punish enemies; the feedback loop between his timeline and federal policy is now a feature, not a bug.4
Zuckerberg and the antitrust fog
Meta’s on trial - the FTC is trying to unwind the Instagram and WhatsApp deals - which means the company has monumental business before the government for months (and maybe years). That’s a motive, not a vibe.5
Google (YouTube) under the microscope
The Supreme Court just let tough Play Store reforms stand while DOJ’s ad‑tech and search cases chew on Google’s business model. When regulators have you on multiple fronts, your incentives get… flexible.6
Bezos and the paper of record‑of‑record
The Washington Post is in a full‑body identity crisis - leadership shake‑ups, resignations, and a new regime with Murdoch‑world DNA. Even benign owners face political weather; owners with federal contracts face storms.7
Murdoch, the forever boss
Still holding Fox and WSJ. Now, per the President’s own boast, possibly an investor in the TikTok deal. When the gatekeeper of modern conservative TV is invited into the youth‑platform of record, you’re not paranoid to ask about the edit.8
The quiet part out loud: “business before the government”
Here’s the tell: when the people who need regulatory favors also write the headlines, the “news” becomes a negotiation. Case in point—a cascade of “settlements” with Trump from companies facing existential fights in Washington:
Paramount paid $16 million to make a 60 Minutes lawsuit vanish while seeking federal approval for that Skydance merger. Journalism advocates called it a dangerous precedent.9
YouTube paid $24.5 million to resolve Trump’s suit over his Jan. 6 suspension; $22 million goes toward a flashy White House ballroom project via a nonprofit. (Read that twice.)
Meta paid $25 million to settle its version of the same battle.10
X paid about $10 million to settle Trump’s Twitter suspension suit.11
You can dress this up as “risk management,” but the smell is the same: pay the man, soothe the regulator, pray the heat moves on. The moral hazard here can be seen from orbit.
What this does to history
When a small club owns the cameras, the studios, the pipes, and the feeds - memory gets programmable. Today’s “clarification” is tomorrow’s “correction,” and by next month it’s a mandated perspective. We’ve already watched political actors threaten museums and cultural institutions, lean on funding, and bully boards to enforce “patriotic” narratives. That’s not museum curation; that’s narrative control with a security badge.
If your first instinct is to doomscroll, congratulations - you’re human. But we need more than coping memes. We need receipts - artifacts that say, “No, actually, this happened,” when the rewrite drops.
Enter The Trumpsonian: a frontline, receipts‑first cultural project
We built The Trumpsonian to be an immune response: a pop‑up museum of American absurdity with the receipts stapled to the wall and the satire sharpened to a judicial edge. The experience moves from the “Hall of Ignorance” (bleach cures and hurricane‑map Sharpies) to the “War on Truth” (an infinity‑mirror of viral lies), through lawlessness and corruption, into the January 6 VR room that puts you inside the crush where it happened. You end in the Hope Activation Zone - register, pledge, organize. That last room is the point.
We’re not here to replace newsrooms. We’re here to preserve primary evidence, to make it impossible to memory‑hole the worst (and weirdest) stretch of civic life in our timeline - and to turn spectators into participants. We’re even pledging 10% of net proceeds to Run for Something, because recruiting and backing down‑ballot defenders of democracy is how you harden the system from the bottom up.
And yes, we’ll meet the moment with satirical donor rewards that double as artifacts of the era: a “Classified Documents Starter Pack” (bathroom staging not included), a spoof “Presidential Pardon” plaque, even an “Acting Secretary of Whatever” certificate - because a little black humor can power a lot of civic action. (The joke is the lure; the mission is the hook.)
Why independent media matters right now
Let’s connect the dots:
CBS News leadership just changed through acquisition, not audit; editorial tone can shift overnight.12
A youth video platform is being recoded into U.S. influence networks with conservative investors at the table. Even with guardrails, that shapes what 170 million Americans see.13
Platforms wrote checks to the President while their antitrust fate is literally in judges’ hands. That’s the dictionary photo for “perverse incentives.”14
Google faces overlapping antitrust orders; compliance will touch search, ads, and app stores - translation: delicate negotiations with the same government their news product covers every day.15
The Post - owned by one of the most government‑exposed companies in America - is wrestling with its soul in real time.16
That’s the larger story: when the state becomes the client, editorial courage becomes a line item. The fixes aren’t simple, but some are obvious: build independent institutions with independent revenue and public‑service DNA strong enough to resist the “friendly suggestion” call from upstairs.
What we’re offering donors and activists (and why it matters)
A permanent, portable ledger of truth. We’re building exhibits that function as multimedia affidavits - from the Wall of Unindicted Co‑Conspirators to the January 6 VR reconstruction. You don’t have to take our word for it; you can hear the calls, see the filings, and feel the timeline lock into place.
Civic on‑ramps baked into the experience. The Hope Activation Zone turns outrage into logistics: register, volunteer, support threatened locals, join targeted campaigns. This is not a selfie museum; it’s a mobilization engine.
Transparent give‑backs. We tithe 10% of net proceeds to Run for Something. Every ticket powers a bench of next‑gen candidates in school boards, city councils, and statehouses - the places authoritarian creep actually gets stopped.
A culture hack with receipts and reach. We’re learning from the viral playbooks (call it the Museum‑of‑Ice‑Cream effect, weaponized for civics) and applying it to the War on Truth room and beyond. Satire shares; receipts stick.
If the traditional gatekeepers buckle - or get bought - we’ll still have a public archive that can’t be gaslit out of existence. That’s the job.
How you can move the needle before the next rewrite drops
Fund the build. If you want the do‑something button, this is it. Our tiers of satirical “rewards” double as conversation starters in hostile rooms. (The “Presidential Pardon” plaque or “Cabinet Appointment” certificate hits different when your uncle insists nothing was abnormal.)
Bring your networks. We need donors, yes - but we also need artists, coders, designers, docents, lawyers, and security pros who understand that truth telling is now a team sport.
Use the platform to build platforms. Share the exhibits, but also recruit for local organizing and down‑ballot races. The museum is a catalyst; the movement is the combustion.
Style note (because voice matters when reality bends)
We write hot, in the first person, with rhythm and controlled velocity - not because theatrics win arguments, but because clarity under pressure requires clean sentences, vivid detail, and a narrator who owns their angle. That’s the method: long riffs when the scene demands, sharp jabs when the point lands. Call it comic savagery in defense of democracy.
Bottom line
Concentration of media power is happening in real time, and it is being greased by payouts and proximity to power. If we let a handful of owners “optimize” the past, the future will be forced to run their version. The Trumpsonian exists to complicate that plot: a place where you can still hear the unedited tape, read the unsanitized placard, and leave with an action plan.
Help build the memory that can’t be bought.